So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (32 page)

The idea of branding the candidate, as opposed to the presidency, isn’t new. Andrew Jackson was “Old Hickory.” Lincoln was “Honest Abe.” Labels such as “New Frontier” might have replaced this to some extent, but Wilson, FDR, Truman, and JFK, while clearly defining their administrations, did not have significant personal labels.

It’s also possible that the proliferation of cable television, blogs, and all the electronic paraphernalia of our era has created a permanent twenty-four-hour campaign and news cycle and a gossip-oriented atmosphere that have made analysis and labeling more difficult, if not impossible.

While it’s difficult to exaggerate the power of electronic media on U.S. politics and public policy, a better answer probably lies in the most fundamental nature of American politics during the past half century—the difference in ideology between those who would expand and those who would reduce government’s role. It can hardly be coincidence that the sloganeers—the Square, New, and Fair Dealers and the New Frontiersmen—were the promoters, strategists, candidates, and, later, presidents who thought government should act affirmatively in an attempt to better people’s lives. Today we would call them activists, neither stabilizers nor traditionalists.

FDR saw “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed” and proposed to fight the “malefactors of great wealth,” using government as a weapon. His cousin before him had fulminated against “the trusts” and went on to “speak softly and carry a big stick” in developing the Panama Canal, using the navy to intimidate in foreign policy, and promoting passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and tough meat inspection laws. Truman’s Fair Deal included national health insurance, the Fair Employment Practices Committee to combat racial prejudice, and the desegregation of the armed forces. JFK threatened the steel industry and got a reduction in prices and launched the Peace Corps.

These are just a few actions marking the presidencies of the sloganeers. Contrast these to a recitation of America’s “present needs” in Warren G. Harding’s 1920 campaign speech: “America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise.” Can anyone imagine Teddy Roosevelt eschewing heroics for healing? FDR calling for restoration and adjustment? Would JFK have won in 1960 on a campaign for equipoise?

Those who would shrink government may now be on the march, but it’s those presidents who believe in government as a way to improve lives or mitigate distress who seem to define their times in office through self-described calls to action.

14

In Which the Death of Daily Print Newspapers Makes Me Grumpy and I Bemoan the Loss of “Above the Fold,” “Jump,” and “Op-Ed”

My generation witnessed the advent and eventual dominance of television, which the print newspaper survived. But the electronics that came after television changed the “news” in ways no one expected.

I agree with the historian Daniel Boorstin that “technology invents needs.” There was no demand, said Boorstin, for the telephone, the automobile, radio, or television. Television was not produced because Americans would no longer suffer the indignity or the inconvenience of leaving their homes and going to a theater to see a motion picture or to a stadium to see a ball game. Nor, Boorstin argued, do technical changes take their bearings by any ancien régime; they arise from what he calls casual glimpses of the future, like eating quick-frozen strawberries in winter. And he calls technology “irreversible,” often with huge, unpredictable consequences.

I moved east in 1948, when I enrolled in the master’s degree program in journalism at Columbia University, which had to be the most enjoyable graduate study program around. For one academic year, the students were submerged in New York journalism; there were then nine full-scale newspapers available, seven days a week, each with full and competing sections and staffs, and for a nickel one could begin the day with the
Times
and the
Herald Tribune
and get a penny in change. For newspaper addicts—the term “junkie” had not yet crossed over from narcotics—the day could continue with the afternoon papers, the
New York Post,
the
Journal-American,
the
World-Telegram,
and the
Sun,
and then late at night, over coffee and a fresh bagel, the
Mirror
and the
Daily News
for the next morning were available, for another nickel and another penny in change.

One main reason we bought so many papers every day was to keep up with the columnists. Arthur Brisbane had a front-page column every day in the Hearst papers until he was stolen by Pulitzer. Scenes based on him are in
Kane
. Winchell, Pegler, Pearson—they were big names remembered now only if one writes or reads books. The model for many of them was Damon Runyon, who once wrote, “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.”

The classes were taught by serious journalism experts, mainly reporters and editors from the
Times,
no grades were ever assigned, and a master’s degree was awarded at the end of the school year. And, for the most part, so were real jobs, on real newspapers, either in New York or in classy newspaper towns like Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Washington. And there was little or no class work at Columbia in the afternoon, but there were three Major League teams (the New York Yankees, the New York Giants, and, yes, the Brooklyn Dodgers), and a subway ride was still a nickel. My classmates and I drank in the whole New York scene (including a fair amount of its beer). We attended classes diligently, at least those in the mornings, we formed long-lasting friendships with some of the professors, we saw almost every play that Broadway season (Brando’s
Streetcar Named Desire
was surely the highlight), some of us went to a baseball game almost every sunny spring afternoon, we wrote the class musical (to the fine martial words of “Maryland, My Maryland”—“Avenge the patriotic gore/That flecked the streets of Baltimore,/And be the battle queen of yore,/Maryland! My Maryland!”—we substituted, in a tribute to the [then, at least] Good Gray
Times
: “There is no sex, there are no crimes, featured in
The New York Times,
of entertainment not a hint, in ‘All the news that’s fit to print’”), and we did our best to liven up some of the duller moments of the curriculum. The dean of the J-School, a rather pompous old-school journalism professor, was the proud owner of two early Associated Press telegraphic bulletins announcing the assassinations of two presidents—“Garfield is dead” and “McKinley killed by assassin in Buffalo.” To sharpen our reporting skills, he arranged one day for the class to be divided into three or four groups. Each group would go into Dean Ackerman’s sanctum, view the bulletins—they were called flimsies in their day—and then come back to the classroom and through a spokesman tell the class what they had seen. Our group saw the possibilities and reported back we had seen two flimsies; one read, “Garfield is dead”; the other read, we announced, “So is McKinley.”

*   *   *

I have had few and declining illusions about journalism; I haven’t watched any of television’s Sunday morning talk shows since the mid-1970s. I would get too angry by what was being said, and I’d start shouting at the TV set. It was too upsetting. And my years handling the press for Robert Kennedy repeatedly reminded me of how less than perfect the demands of news gathering could be.

As a U.S. Senator and then as a presidential candidate, Robert Kennedy had no formal security. Until Robert Kennedy himself was assassinated, there were no Secret Service details assigned to any candidates for president until they became the official nominee of their party; otherwise that kind of official security was limited to officeholders. We relied on local police for guidance to our motorcade—the candidate’s car, a few vehicles for local dignitaries, and the press bus, always last in the procession so the reporters could observe if any special incidents occurred along the way. Early in the campaign, I told the press we had an “off afternoon” one day, just to do some commercials in a few rural areas, only to find the reporters declining the rest period and insisting on accompanying RFK. I explained we didn’t want, obviously, any coverage of the commercials until they went on the air, and the media said they understood and would respect any embargo but wanted to be present “just in case anyone tries to shoot him.”

*   *   *

Much of what bothers me is television. For print journalism, I have an innate appreciation, which makes sense. I was born into a world in which print newspapers dominated the definition of “news” and placement in the newspaper defined the relative importance of each news item. Until the advent of radio in the 1930s, advances in technology—the telegraph, photography, and printing—had all
augmented
the popularity and primacy of newspapers. During the 1930s and 1940s, radio emerged but never really challenged newspapers. For example, I read more than half a dozen different newspapers every day when I attended journalism school in New York City. That era, in fact, had seen the peak growth in city newsstands and shouting newsboys.

Then, of course, came television, which during the 1960s and 1970s surged past print journalism as the nation’s prime headline maker—virtually killing the afternoon newspaper (Ernest Hemingway had titled a book about bullfighting
Death in the Afternoon,
and the phrase returned as a description of the newspaper business). But the daily newspaper as an often-dominant force in society and as a profit-generating enterprise flourished. Then came today’s era of the Internet. No one will call a print newspaper a “newspaper” anymore, which has opened a kind of new linguistic terrain. Print newspapers grow steadily more rare and must be called “print newspapers” because the word “newspaper,” when it is used, mostly refers to an online newspaper—which is more correctly called something without the word “paper.”

Young people, well educated though often non-educated, do not lament the loss of the print newspaper; they watch and read their phones and laptops, and they (for the most part) regard people reading a print newspaper as old-fashioned. They probably do not realize they are the first generation since the birth of the United States that has not relied on a print newspaper as its primary guide to what news and ideas are important.

The first generation since the birth of the United States that has not relied on a print newspaper
. To put this in perspective: What we now call “newspapers” first appeared in Amsterdam and arrived in England around 1620. They were often one broad sheet of paper, filled with print and folded over, and had evolved from handwritten letters that were bundled and circulated to a fixed group of subscribers. In the early 1830s, marketing innovations first produced the “penny press” and mass circulation; from then until the past decade or so, mass circulation of print newspapers has been one of the few constants in American life. “After a night’s sleep,” Henry David Thoreau writes in
Walden
(1854), “the news is as indispensable as the breakfast.” And this opinion was not new. Half a century earlier, the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel had written that “the morning reading of the newspaper is a kind of realistic morning prayer.”

To those in their twenties or younger, I must look, sitting here with my printed newspaper, like a guy who just tied his horse outside and wandered in to sit by the wood-burning stove. To ask the youngsters what they read in today’s paper would make no sense. They get their news from their computers and cell phones—up to the second. When visiting a newspaper’s Web site, they expect an ever-changing, instantly updated “front page.” Knowing this is the new mass audience, even establishment newspapers like
The New York Times
have relegated to a corner button “today’s print edition.” It is respected like a bit of nostalgia—a historical relic that often carries items a day later than they’ve appeared online.

There will be no real “front page,” but the phrase will probably linger on, if for nothing else than the great newspaper/comedy play (and later at least two movies) by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Fox tried it as the title of an instantly moribund newsmagazine some years ago. Hard to know what online lingo will replace the “jump,” the “typo,” and the special names for sections. How can one ask one’s wife for the sports section at breakfast when there is none? And what about the “funnies”? Originally, the “funny papers,” now the “comics”? And who will be able to claim a “scoop” when everything that happens is available for everyone at the click of a mouse? Nice old—and not so old—words and phrases like “op-ed” and “above the fold” will disappear.

Soon, each of us will have our own “page one,” “op-ed,” “the jump.” People will look at their screens and not be able to imagine what such words used to mean. Why would that matter? Yes, things change, and stories—the news—are still available. But changes like this don’t happen often, and they aren’t always good. When you’re on the Internet, you read what you see. Your eye can’t catch an interesting story from a facing page, because there is no facing page. People may still love their morning newspaper, but they’ll get it a different way, and it will be organized differently. Their eyes will catch lists of stories about other things. Most important, they’ll be able to easily see all the stories about things that interest them, things they think they need to know or agree with. “Need to know”? What does that mean? People will be less well-informed, only they won’t know it. In fact, we’ll have to redefine what “well-informed” means. No editors, no proofreaders; likely, no reporters. We’ll just be informed about
Dancing with the Stars,
hurricanes, the odd murder, and the opinions expressed on Fox News—which, incidentally, is a classic oxymoron.

*   *   *